ahh. I finally get it.
I had startT at 200 and then alert at 100 or 30.
with startT at 230 and then alert at 2 and second alert at 1 it works. There is no description in the fields that format for time changes between start T and the alerts. Can you make alerts same format as startT so I can have an alert at 30 seconds? Or if you don't want to make any major changes can you label that the alert needs to be in minutes not seconds like startT?

If i put in 6000 to get one hour, hit pause, reset and start the startT time changes to 10000 and then counts down correctly starting with 5959. Weird. What is the max time supported? is 5959 the max?
If I put in 9000 to do an hour and a half it starts counting down from 13000...

clearly i'm all confused with the time entry here but I think others would be too then.